Keep it simple

Top 5 advances in ETL and BI in the past 15 years:

Near Real-time Data Warehouses

Dashboards

Drag and Drop ETL

Ad hoc Analytics

Metadata Driven ETL

What is missing from the list above? That would be the fact that BI use has not penetrated into everyday business life like we would have expected. But wasn’t that the point that we were all heading towards, that of BI for the masses? That goal of information transparency that everyone was looking for seems to have gotten lost by most vendors in the race to have the biggest and baddest feature list. Very powerful BI technology exists today to get at pretty much any data and slice and dice it in ways that we could have only imagined years ago. Yet, the complexity and disparity of that technology continues to be a major roadblock to getting everyday business managers the information they need to best run their businesses. Now, add in the ever changing, dynamic nature of business today, we find the chasm between the IT department and business users largely intact with business users seeking more and more self service BI on their own.

That is why we set out on our Agile BI initiative, to solve these obvious problems that other vendors ignore. The market and competitive response to our Agile BI initiative has been fun to watch. Suddenly, lots of competitors are talking about how to make their technology more agile and industry analysts are again writing about agile as well.

Unfortunately, competitors miss the point. Pentaho’s Agile BI initiative looks to make things simpler, not more complex. This isn’t about adding more technology to the mix, this is about using the technology that we already have in more agile and elegant ways so that we can bridge the chasm between IT and business users. It’s not about long winded explanations of technology infrastructure that only technology geniuses can understand, it’s about opening up the BI process so that IT and business users can collaborate and deploy business relevant BI application quicker.